Yes, ticks are involuntary movements like constant eye blinking, shoulder shrugging and sometimes they say even sniffing or throat clearing can be a tick. My daughter started with all these when she was 4. I assumed it was allergies and I'm sure most of the movements are allergy related. But after a ton of research, I found that ticks and Tourette Syndrome has a strong link to allergies. I'm not sure if it's coincidental or not.

According the to the pediatrician I took my daughter to a lot of kids have them but are most likely to outgrow them in adolescence.

The ticks with the "k" at the end are nasty little parasitic bugs.
That's interesting that tics (not of the bug variety) are connected with allergies---has anyone heard why? Do allergies sometimes affect the nervous system?

Last edited by Helen on Sun Apr 02, 2006 1:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's very interesting about the tics. My 4 yr old son does not have tics, but he does have other health issues related to developmental delays. He sees many medical specialists, and he is involved with many different types of therapies, but they do not feel there is a link with his allergies. I sometimes wonder, though. Of all his health concerns, his food allergies far outweigh anything else - because we are talking about life & death - so I don't tend to "worry" as much about his other health concerns. Of course, we are addressing all his needs, but I save up all my "worry" for dealing with his food allergies

Because my sister has Tourette, we have done a lot of research to know where it came from. You are right that Tourette and allergies are closely related (so are a couple of other things like Fibromyalgia). All of those are from an hyperactive immune system, but it is not because your kid as a few twitches that it is Tourette, Tourette is very serious and can rarely be outgrown in comparasion to a few twitches that can come and go as people age.

Its interesting that others have seen tics in their allergic children - I never noticed the connection but we have experienced this as well. My #2 son is asthmatic/nut allergic/sensitive to yellow food dyes (make him hyper) and he has ADD. During stressful times - especially grades 6-8 when his health took a turn for the worse - we noticed that when he was watching TV, he began to make sounds, clear his throat, repeat the TV ads over and over and a few other stress signals that I don't remember. I wondered at the time about Tourettes as my husband has a 2nd cousin affected by that. But, I also remembered during my own years at that age that I also had repeated stress habits - was totally aware of what I was doing but was unable to stop them - they were actually comfort signals. I began to quietly make my son aware when he was making sounds and asked him each time to take a deep breath and let it out slowly and then count to ten in his head. That gave him a distraction to do instead of the habit that was fast taking over his resting, awake time. We noticed it improved over the summer months, mostly because he wasn't in school and stress was lower but it took several months to achieve. During higher stress times, like exams, it would often resurface but then slowly would go away again. By high school age, it was under control.

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